Continueing from the last 2 parts about SEO, here comes the final part. Make sure you read the first 2 parts before reading this final post.

As mentioned before, the algorithm used by Google is constantly changing and includes many unknown factors (most recently the load speed of a page is starting to affect ranking as well, encouraging developers to reduce the load time as much as possible). I will now list some unconventional techniques for trying to increase your site’s Google Search Engine Result page ranking or visitor number.

Where previously it used to take a huge amount of keywords in the header (some being completely irrelevant to the actually content of the site) to get loads of traffic to your site, things have become more complex. As search engines have evolved since the start of the internet, they have also become more intelligent, making it almost impossible to get irrelevant traffic to your website. At present unauthorised techniques or Black Hat SEO can even get your site penalised, making it totally disappear from any Search Engine Results Page (In the SEO world referred to as SERP).

A few examples of black Hat SEO techniques are spamdexing, link farming or keyword stuffing. Spamdexing is a technique where you create pages especially for search engines, in an attempt to get a higher ranking for a particular key word phrase. It is a reverse engineering trick  where the webmaster thinks of key words and phrases a user might input into a search engine and try to build his page to include as many of those keyword phrases in the content as possible.

Keyword stuffing is similar to spamdexing, where a webmaster puts as many related keywords as possible onto a page, but where he doesn’t care how the page looks like and the main objective is to either redirect to an affiliate or to click on a sponsored ad.

Link farming is a group of websites where every website in the group links to every other website in that group, thus spamming the index of a search engine. However, when the linking is done from sites that are relevant to each other it is not considered a black hat technique.

Another definite don’t do is hiding texts or having titles shown in the same colour as the background (because title tags are more likely to get picked up by search engines as keywords).

Improving your Organic Search Engine ranking is something that takes more time compared to the paid Search Engine inclusion and is something that is influenced by not just one factor (highest bid per keyword click) but by a whole group of factors combined into the search engine algorithm. Do not expect your changes to have an overnight effect! Not all of the factors of the search engine algorithm are known and the importance of each factor varies.

The key to getting as high as possible for search terms RELATIVE to your site’s content is CONSTANT revision and monitoring using monitoring tools such as Google Analytics. Once you reach a high ranking, don’t believe you can sit on your laurels as your competition will do double the effort to knock you off that high spot! Organic Search engine Optimization is an ONGOING process!

I will now continue where I left off in Part 1, where we looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we examined the differences between organic and paid search results and we looked at how to make sure the pages of your website are optimized. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, do this first.

you think your site structure is acceptable now. So how do you get the indexing by a search engine started? The best way for this is to create a Google webmaster account (this is really easy if you already have a Gmail account) and

register your website through the webmaster tools by placing a verification code in your website header. The webmaster tool will allow you to upload an XML sitemap into the system, helping your site to get indexed faster and easier. There are plenty of sites where you can enter your URL and those sites will create the XML sitemap. I’ve found that http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ works quite well.

In the Google webmaster tools you will also find a section for inserting / creating a robot.txt file. In this file you can specify which folders should be accessed by the search engine spider. Say you have a folder containing some images that you use for your website layout. The last thing you want is to have these images show up in a Google image search. That’s why you should protect this folder and disallow the spider access to it.

Now you know the structure of your site is good, but for which keywords and/or keyword phrases do you want to appear on the SERPs?

I found it best to always select a primary and secondary keyword phrase, and make sure these appear in the meta tags (keyword and description), page copy, title tags and file name / URL as much as possible. Remember, the higher in the page that your keyword phrases occur in your body text, the better.

In your HTML header section, you have the possibility to insert a meta-description and keywords. The meta-description has to describe in short what the visitor can find on this page. This will be displayed under the link on the SERP (see below) and ideally should not contain over 160 characters. Make sure the primary and secondary keyword phrases are present in this description. In the keyword section you can enter as many keywords as desired, separated by commas, but ideally you do not want more than 7-8 keyword phrases in there. Make sure each page has a different set of keyword phrases and meta-descriptions, as each page clearly contains different information.

A good tip that can help you on your way is to scope out the competition. What keyword phrases are they using? The key to success with keyword and keyword phrases is constant revision. This is where Google Analytics comes into play. It allows you to see what terms do well and what terms barely gets any hits. A phrase getting hits but resulting in a high bounce rate might suggest that this phrase is not relevant to your site or page content by the visitors. Interpreting the data that lies before you in Analytics is a key stone to successful SEO.

If you are promoting a business located in a certain geographic area, then you want to make sure that you are as highly ranked as possible for the relevant search terms in that geographical area. A lot of times, people start inputting this geographic location into the keyword phrases such as “web development London”. However, this can easily be bypassed by using Google Local (Yahoo! Has something similar as well, whilst Bing…..well….Bing is just for the yanks J). Google local search inputs your business onto a map in such a manner that when you input your geographic search phrase, a little map shows up with an indication of local business.

Another effective step to directing relevant traffic to your site is linking. Having other websites with topics relevant to yours link to your website does half the work for you. Why? Simple, you already know that these visitors are relevant (they are coming from a site with a relevant topic remember?), thus increasing the chance for a goal conversion (either selling a product through your website or having people complete a contact form) dramatically. Having other sites link to your site also increases your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page, as your site will be associated with the keyword phrases displayed on the website linking to your site. Careful, make sure the link displays on relevant topic pages. If the Google spider decides this is not the case, this might negatively affect your ranking or might even result in your website not appearing at all in the search results. (See link farming explained further in part 3).

In part 3, we’ll be looking at some of the more unconventional techniques for increasing your search ranking.

As I haven’t got around to writing about my latest skill additions, just thought I would post an article I wrote almost 2 years back for my good friend David Riley, Co founder and director of Good Lizard Media. The article was aimed at non techy people, so they would get an insight into what Search Engine Optimisation or SEO really is, the different types of SEO and what tasks it consist of. This list is by no means exclusive and I do not claim to hold the Holy Grail in SEO.  There are constantly new techniques popping up and search engines such as Google adapt their ranking algorithms regularly, sometimes resulting in different aspects of your website being rewarded or penalised. Bare in mind this article was written in 2010.

I will list the article in 3 parts, just as it appeared on the Good Lizard Media blog (part 1, part 2 and part 3 on their website), as it it quite large.

Right, here we go.

A successful website is a twofold process, where step 2 always leads back to step 1.
Step 1 is to get visitors to your site, step 2 is to have that visitor requesting information or purchasing a product from your website. This leads you back to step 1;  How can I get the maximum percentage of visitors to become buyers? What kind of visitor do I want to attract? Is this a relevant visitor? How can I achieve a relevant visitor?

The answer: Obtain a visitor that was either redirected from another relevant website or a visitor that found your website through a relevant search.

In this blog I will focus over the course of the coming weeks on the traffic coming from search engines, and then more precisely the traffic coming from organic Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP). I will try to shed some light onto how to easily improve your Organic Search Results Ranking, the process also known as Organic SEO. Did I lose you already? No worries, let’s just start from the top.

What is SEO? Wikipedia tells us the following about Organic SEO:

“the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”

Ok, unpaid search results, that sounds good. Now which search engine should I optimize for? Which ones are available on the market and does my target market play a role in this? The figure on the right gives you a good idea of the key players in the Search Engine market. Agreed, if you live in the UK you might be thinking to yourself “AOL…yeah right! „ , but if you wish to target the US market as well, then the relevance of AOL certainly comes into play. Concentrating on the UK market here, it is fair to say that Google is the main player, so I will focus my attention on that particular search engine.

Now, when I do a search in Google, I get a page with many different sections. Which section am I aiming to get top rankings in? What is Paid search and what is Organic? In figure 3, organic search is shown in the green colour, and makes up the largest area in the search results. The other areas are called “Sponsored links” and the rankings are determined by bidding on keywords.

So what influences the ranking of your website for a certain search term? Google has never disclosed any exact algorithm that is used to prevent incorrect use of it, but besides tips listed hereunder, I would say the key in all of this is RELEVANCY.

A first step in achieving SEO is actually tracking your site performance. To do this, register on Google and go to the Analytics section to register your site. You will be asked to place some tracking code in your website, so you will need access to your website code. This tracking will make it possible to analyse your site and see where your visitors come from and through which source (direct, referring site or through a search engine).

Now then, let’s see some factors that influence the ranking of your site and how to optimise those.

A good starting point in my opinion is always to make sure your (X)HTML structure is good. This starts with validating your pages (not just the home page!) and CSS file. This can easily be done by using an online tool for XHTML or CSS validating. A quick search gave me this as a place where I can do this http://validator.w3.org/.  Validation can for instance tell you if you have an image in your site that does not have the ‘alt’ property set. A meaningful ‘alt’ and ‘title’ property on an image can aid your image in showing up in the Google image search results.
A validated XHTML file doesn’t necessarily mean its structure is correct. Make sure each page has a different title and make sure that the title is relevant to what that page displays. A proper header hierarchy is also a must (only 1 <h1> tag, following tags have to be h2 and subsections of that h3 etc).
Good formed links always improves the visitor experience and affects search engine spiders in a positive way. The same can be said for the URL’s to your pages. A lot of dynamic sites might use a URL structure such as http://www.example.cm/index.php?pageid=8. Unfortunately this URL does not give the visitor any information on what he/she might find at this location. It is better to use user friendly URL’s such as http://www.example.com/what-we-do.php, where the URL clearly indicates what that page will be about. The trend is to replace any spaces in the URL name by dashes.

In the following part I will be looking at how to get your pages indexed by the search engines and how to get your keywords right.

As I come across these challenges, I will attempt to write them down here to help people that are faced with the same issues.